MacSoft has announced that Westlake Interactive's President Phil Sulak and co-founder Ken Cobb have joined MacSoft in senior engineering roles. The pair will remain in Austin, TX and will work exclusively on MacSoft's ports to the Mac.

Here's more from the press release:

With twenty-nine titles released during his fifteen-year career, Phil Sulak has worked for many of the games industry's most influential companies. As president of Westlake, Phil helped code many of the Macintosh platform's biggest titles, including Halo: Combat Evolved, The Sims, Rise of Nations, Dungeon Siege, and Total Annihilation. Three of his titles at Westlake have earned Macworld magazine's prestigious “Eddy” Award.

"I've worked with Peter Tamte and Al Schilling on and off for almost eight years,” said Sulak. “The people at MacSoft care very much about the games they release, and Ken and I are very enthusiastic about the future of Destineer and MacSoft."

Although his degree is in Biomedical Engineering, Ken Cobb has worked as a software developer for his entire professional life, including adapting computers for use by the severely handicapped. As one of the co-founders of Westlake, Cobb has worked on many games for the Mac, including Unreal, Tomb Raider, Halo: Combat Evolved and Rise of Nations. "It's great to be working for MacSoft now,” said Cobb. “They're a good group of people, they have some super projects coming up, and I’m happy to be part of it."

"This puts an exclamation point on our continued dedication to Mac gaming," said MacSoft General Manager, Al Schilling. “Especially during the coming period of technical transition in the Macintosh platform, having some of the Mac industry's most talented engineers gives us extra ability to make our Mac games great."

IMG would like to wish Phil Sulak and Ken Cobb good fortune and good ports!
MacSoft

1) Order any three or more games through Macgamestore.com, and get Aspyr's Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy for free (a $39.95 value). Simply add three games of your choice and Jedi Academy to your cart, then apply coupon code: jedi.

IMG has posted a QuickTime version of a new Stubbs The Zombie trailer, which was previously available on MTV.com in Windows Media Format only. Be sure to check it out by following the link below to the trailer.

The game is due out on the XBOX, PC, and Mac later this year and will be published by Aspyr Media.

At WWDC today, OverTheEdge announced the release of its Unity game development suite. Unity aims to raise the bar in global game development by enabling the simple and rapid translation of gaming ideas to the screen. The Unity engine was recently used in the creation of the company's first game, GooBall, published recently by Ambrosia Software.

Unity combines a user-friendly GUI application, which can be picked up and learned in a matter of hours, with serious under the hood enhancements that take advantage of the graphics capabilities in Tiger. Anyone will be able to easily develop games using a realistic and fast Ageia physics engine and a powerful new proprietary graphics engine to make games that work on both Mac and PC. Unity-created games can run in Apple's Safari web browser, or other select Internet browsers, and can also be exported as Dashboard widgets.

“With Unity we hope to start a revolution. You will see small groups of creative people making new types of games, on smaller budgets, with more creative freedom," said David Helgason, co-founder and CEO of OverTheEdge. “Games with advanced features such as physics based gameplay, high-end shaders, character animation and ragdolls.”

“Apple's use of powerful technologies like OpenGL and our breakthrough Xcode development tools make Tiger a great platform for developing eye-popping entertainment," said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “Unity takes advantage of Tiger innovations, such as Spotlight and Dashboard, to quickly find game assets in large projects and also deploy finished games as easily accessed widgets.”

OverTheEdge is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information on the Unity engine, head over to the official web site.
Over The Edge

BeyondUnreal has posted the first part of a four-part series taking a look at the history of the Unreal Engine. An engine that has carried a multitude of titles, including the famed Unreal series, Part 1 takes a look at the engine in its first public incarnation, including the features that made it so popular:

Probably the biggest draw to Unreal was the ability to mod it. Tim Sweeney (Founder of Epic) wrote a simple scripting engine into the game called UnrealScript. The modders went to work. Within months of the release of Unreal, several interesting mods had been announced and released. Suddenly, RealCTF brought the classic Capture the Flag gametype to Unreal. With speed, several other mods made their way on to the scene. A “top down” mod, Unloaded, changed the whole POV of the game. Real weapons mods like Serpentine and Infiltration were released and it seemed the train would never slow down.

Change is in the air. Out with the old and in with the new seems to be the theme lately. Apple has announced its future switch to Intel, and GarageGames, the champion of the indie game developer, has made some changes of their own. Long time president Jeff Tunnel has stepped down in favor of Mark Frohnmayer, a "smarter, younger guy" in Tunnel's words. Here's a few words from Frohnmayer:

"GarageGames now has three powerful engines, and we're constantly improving our development toolset," said Frohnmayer. "We've got several exciting projects on the horizon including a killer casual game being developed in partnership with another company and a downloadable title for the upcoming Xbox 360. Jeff has done a fantastic job getting us through the startup phase, and I plan on continuing to fulfill the vision we all started."

OrderedBytes's utility ControllerMate has been updated to version 2.2.1. A program that allows for the assigning of keyboard functions to various HID devices, the latest version brings with it a wider variety of supported controllers, as well as a few other changes:

ControllerMate will now attempt to connect to nearly any type of HID device defined in version 1.11 of the HID specification.

The preference panels have been expanded to allows users to select exactly which types of HID devices appear in ControllerMate's Palette window and the types of building blocks that are created for each type of HID element.

Following the announcement that Apple will be switching to Intel in 2006, IMG contacted several Mac game developers to get their initial thoughts. A growing concern came after yesterday's keynote, when Apple's Phil Schiller stated there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

Reactions from developers run the gamut from fear about cannibalized sales to excitement about better performance being able to keep up with that latest game technology and faster porting times. Uncertainty is the common thread, as no one will know what these new machines are truly capable of, and the implications that will arise because of this move, until they are released.